Why SEO And Strategy Need To Be An Integrated Process Part 1

Digital Marketing

The SEO landscape is an ever-evolving entity and as we all know long gone are the days when you could get by on link building and some well-placed keywords. The game has changed in how people use search. The game has changed even more when people get to a website.

SEO Strategy is (or at least should be) a big part of any search marketing plan. As marketers and business owners we need to know more about how people engage with our site. We need to understand what they want so that we can give it to them. This means knowing how the site looks and feels to how it operates right down to what the data gathered tells us. This is why a search engine marketing strategy will make sense for your business.

A Site Should Lead Visitors Through A Sales Path

It’s great to have traffic to your site, but what do you want people to do once they get there? A major issue I’ve encountered over my years in the industry is finding users who are stuck not knowing where to go next on a web page. I think it’s safe to assume most sites want visitors to ultimately buy (or buy into) something. Does your site do this? What goals do you have? Are you an e-commerce site? Do you offer services? Do purchases happen offline? Knowing this you can tailor a site to fit those goals. A great SEO strategy is to check and see how well a page works would be by reviewing both “bounce rate” and “exit rate” in your Google Analytics account. These will tell us if people are: A) not getting to the page they thought or B) potentially exiting a page (and your site) without taking a specific action. If these percentages are high (over 45% then it may be worth investigating why.

What Are Your Website Goals?

In most cases I hear people say they want more sales. Ok, great! But, how are we going to track our efforts? Beyond having your phone number clearly visible, online forms or other CTA’s (calls to action) that lead people in the right direction, how are you going to calculate how well things are working? Google Analytics has a great section that allows you to track various types of goals. The simplest is tracking how many people filled out a form. Without any coding, you can track forms from various products/services/pages that you want. How powerful is it to know if blue widgets are getting more goal completions over the red widgets?

Track Your Phone Calls

I often hear from people who are involved in a search marketing program that their phones aren’t ringing because of any online efforts. It’s understandable. Who’s going to ask exactly how you found my company other than “I saw you online”. If you really want to know if your phone is ringing you can set yourself up with a “call tracking” phone number. It works just like a regular number and would even forward to your regular line but, depending on the service provider you can get a lot of data on calls.

Did you pick up or not? How many rings before you did? How did that call happen (SEO, PPC, Social, other)? Some services offer a recording of the call (how was your first impression?)

Ultimately you’ll find out a lot about how many calls resulted from your search engine marketing strategy.

In Part 2 we will explore how a Facebook marketing strategy should be an integrated part of your SEO strategy.